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The 60-Second Lead Review

Those of you who attended our User’s Conference and saw Adam’s presentation on How Pardot Uses Pardot for Marketing may have already heard about our lead intake process. For those that didn’t, I’d like to share how we review new leads and assess if they should be passed to sales.

Every lead that comes into our system gets a quick, 60-second overview by yours truly. This process consists of scanning the lead record and looking for a few key points:

Name and Email Address: Do they look valid? If someone puts “John Doe,” they probably aren’t a serious prospect who’s ready to purchase.

Score: How active where they?

Activities: Did they download just one item, or multiple? Did they actually open the email and read the material? Did they search for key terms or for our company name? These help feel out how educated and interested the prospect is.

Company Website: If the above criteria look good at first glance, I take 30 seconds to click over to their website (automatically populated in Pardot in the company field) and look at what they do. I am primarily looking for their product or service offering, their company size and also if they have key components that fit our service on their site (for us, this would be things like a content library or contact forms).

If all the above requirements check out, the final step before assigning a lead over to sales is to do a quick search in our CRM and check for lead ownership. If the company is already working with a rep, the lead goes straight to that sales rep. If they aren’t, I assign them to a group we’ve set up in Pardot for sales users. This ensures that distribution is equal between all reps (Pardot does not use sales territories or other methods of division, all leads are fair game).

For some companies, a more automated system may work well (assigning leads based on certain activities), but for us we find that this helps ensure that only the most qualified leads are passed to the sales team. This helps boost the success of the sales team and also helps marketing determine the true value of a campaign. As long as you know what you’re looking for, lead review can be a streamlined process.